


A Single Fabric

by anthean



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Multi, Sports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-03 17:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6619204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthean/pseuds/anthean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a long time to learn everything about a person. Finn, Rey, and Poe are still learning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Single Fabric

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Niki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niki/gifts).



> For Niki! I hope you like this; this was my first time writing Star Wars fic and I had so much fun!
> 
> Thank you to tumblr user afamiliardog for the beta-read.

Rey tosses the ball from hand to hand, then bounces it a few times against the pavement. “So, you just try to hit the target with the ball?” she asks.

Poe nods. “Pretty much.” It’s a cool, breezy, day, light upper-atmosphere winds spinning thin cirrus clouds across the sky—a good day to be flying, Poe thinks, but a good day to be out behind the X-wing hangar too, teaching Finn and Rey to play Kitrac. “And stop the other players from scoring. Makes it harder.” He grins at Rey; she throws the ball hard at his chest, where he catches it.

“I’ve seen Testor and Snap playing,” Finn says. “They make it look easy.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” says Poe, tossing the ball to Finn, who snatches it out of the air. “Usually we play individually, everyone against everyone else, but I thought that, since it’s your first time, we could do two-on-one, you and Rey against me. Even things up.”

“I don’t need—“ Rey starts, but Finn breaks in.

“No, no, I like that. Teamwork, huh?” he says, nudging his shoulder against Rey’s. “You and me, we’ll take him out.” Rey smiles, predatory, and nudges Finn back.

“Excellent,” Poe says, picking up the second ball at his feet. Kitrac is simple at its roots, played by children across the Republic, but the variation invented by the Resistance X-wing jockeys as a way of blowing off steam between missions is a little more vigorous. The court is the flat paved area behind the hangar; the target is a rough rectangle chalked about ten feet up on the hangar wall. Each player gets a ball, and scores by hitting the rectangle with their own ball while simultaneously stopping the other players from scoring. Poe is pretty good, although Jess is the pilots’ undisputed champion.

“Okay, first to ten points wins. Keep score, BB-8?” he asks, and BB-8 burbles affirmation from where it sits, a safe distance outside the court.

“We’re going to destroy you, Dameron,” says Rey, and Finn nods solemnly.

“You’re gonna try,” Poe says. “Okay, go!” and he hurls himself between them and takes a shot at the target that misses by inches, laughing at Finn’s shout of outrage.

Rey reacts quickly, kicking Poe’s ball away from him and blocking him from lunging after it, and Finn takes advantage of Poe’s distraction to take a shot of his own. His ball hits the target dead center and BB-8 beeps as it records the point.

“Nice shot!” Rey shouts, and Finn whoops in celebration. They’re not watching Poe, though, and he ducks past them to score his own point.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Rey says, and leaps for him, shoving her hand in his face as she tries to knock him off balance. The game stays tied for a few minutes before Finn scores three times in quick succession, the third off a pass from Rey that sails straight over Poe’s outstretched arms and head, to Rey’s triumphant shout and BB-8’s staccato beep as it updates the score. Rey tallies their fifth point, and the sixth comes when Finn takes a flying leap to knock Poe’s shot off-course and simultaneously throw his own ball backwards over his shoulder to hit the target. Finn falls to the ground and rolls to his feet to go after his ball, which has bounced nearly out of the court on the rebound.

“Poe!” yells Rey, and throws his own ball back to him.

“What?” he gasps, and Rey laughs.

“You need help,” she says, and runs past him to where Finn, ball in hand, is charging up the court. She blocks Finn, using her slim frame with surprising effect, and Poe scores.

“Get it!” Poe shouts, and Rey breaks away from Finn to pick up Poe’s rebound and score again. “Beautiful!” Poe calls to her, and BB-8 adds its congratulations in a series of fluid beeps.

That’s the last time they score, though. Rey gets off a few solid shots that just miss the target, and Poe manages to block no small number of Finn’s shots, but then finally one makes it to the target, and then another and another and another and finally BB-8 is trumpeting the final score: Finn’s ten points to Poe and Rey’s three, and Finn is running a victory lap around the court, arms raised.

Poe is out of breath, his knee feels a little wrenched, and there might be a bruise coming up on his shoulder blade—from what, he has no idea. Standing, he decides, is overrated, and he sits down in the middle of the court, legs folded. BB-8 rolls across the court and bumps into his unbruised shoulder, whistling a reprimand and—

“Hey,” he says. “I’m not that old.” Rey and Finn have walked over, and he leans back on his elbows and grins.

“You’re right,” Rey says. “You’re middle-aged at worst.” She sits down facing him and Finn follows, lying down with his head on Poe’s thighs. Rey extends a foot to poke him in the ribs, and then snatches it back when he makes a grab for her ankle.

“My impending old age aside, what was that?” Poe says. He sits up and shakes Finn’s shoulder lightly. “You said you’d never played Kitrac before.”

“Cheater,” Rey says, poking Finn again. This time she lets Finn hold her ankle, resting her foot against his shoulder.

“Definitely cheating,” Poe says.

Finn tilts his head to get a better look at Poe’s face. “No,” he says slowly. “You assumed I’d never played. I never said one way or the other.”

Poe flops backwards. “Here lies Poe Dameron, cut down by treachery,” he declaims. He sits up again and catches Rey’s eye; she shakes her head at him, then gives in and giggles.

Finn looks back at the sky. The cirrus clouds have spread and thickened while they’d been playing: rain tonight, maybe. Poe wonders what Finn sees when he looks at the clouds. “We called it Deadball, but Kitrac is almost the same as a game we played in the First Order,” Finn says. “We didn’t really have free time, you know? We had rec time, but that had to be spent with your unit, and anything you did had to be useful, or productive, or something. Like, whatever you did, you had to demonstrate that you doing it would benefit the First Order. So you could go to the firing range, or use the tactical simulators, or there were a few other options. Anyway, the commanders thought Deadball was good for agility and cardiac fitness, and a few other troopers in my unit really liked it, so we ended up playing a lot. I got pretty good at it.” Finn has a strange look on his face, half thoughtful and half angry, and Poe reaches forward to rest his hand on Finn’s head, feeling the dips and curves of his skull. Finn’s short hair is damp with sweat, and it coats Poe’s fingers.

"This is what I get for making assumptions," Poe says. "Crushing defeat."

“Kitrac isn’t a team sport, though,” Rey says, and her voice doesn’t rise but it’s a question anyway.

Finn exhales, not quite a laugh. “That was a bonus, as far as the officers were concerned. We were supposed to work together as a unit without actually getting attached to each other as people. So we’d sometimes play against other units, that was okay, but we’d still each be playing for ourselves.”

“That…doesn’t sound fun,” Rey says.

“It was and it wasn’t,” Finn says, squeezing her ankle. “Beating the two of you, now, that was fun.”

“We weren’t doing too bad,” Rey says.

“We were doing pretty bad,” Poe replies.

“You were,” Finn says, and BB-8 chirps. “See, my buddy BB-8 agrees with me.” Finn holds a hand out and BB-8 bumps into it, its version of a high-five.

“So,” Rey says. Her posture hasn’t changed, but her shoulders are a little tense, like she’s restraining herself. Rey doesn’t like sitting still for too long, Poe’s noticed. “Rematch?”

“Challenge accepted,” Finn says, scrambling to his feet with Rey close behind him.

“Better idea,” Poe says, taking Finn’s offered hand and pulling himself up. “We find Jess and Snap and maybe some of the ground crew and challenge them to a game.” He doesn’t let go of Finn’s hand, instead begins pulling him towards the hangar’s open door.

“Yes!” Rey crows, jogging along behind them. BB-8 beeps excitedly.

“Just wait,” Poe says. “They’re not gonna know what hit them."

* * *

“Spanner,” Rey says, and Finn picks the spanner wrench out of the array of tools in front of him and passes it down to her. She’s balanced on the closed S-foil of an older X-wing, a panel of plating unbolted and set on the wing beside her so she can work on the foil’s interior.

Finn has set himself up next to the foil on a beat-up hydraulic platform lift, an impressively varied collection of tools laid out before him. It’s a quiet day, no missions or meetings planned—or at least none that involve him—no rumors of First Order action in any nearby systems, and the hangar is comparatively empty. A few bays down, Poe is chatting with some of his friends from the ground crew, and their voices echo through the hangar’s cavernous space, ripples of brightness and laughter.

“Here,” Rey says. She passes the spanner back up to Finn, who sets it back in its place among the other tools. “Torsion locker? And wire strippers. The red, not the—”

“Not the green, I know. You got it,” Finn says as he passes the tools down, and Rey smiles briefly before going back to work. Rey is a much more patient teacher when her ship isn’t falling apart beneath her, and Finn can keep up with her on most repairs, these days. She's rewiring the foil's electrical components, which are possibly out of date and possibly just not up to Rey's standards.

On the foil, Rey begins sorting through a tangle of wires, selecting a few and stripping away precise lengths of insulation. Her mouth is moving slightly, and Finn almost doesn’t realize why at first.

Rey is singing.

It’s faint, almost inaudible under the sounds of the hangar, but as Finn listens more closely he hears more. Rey’s voice is clear and tuneful even under her breath, but her song is melancholy, about looking for a lost beloved but becoming disheartened by the vastness of the galaxy into which the loved one has vanished.

“ _I went down to Ekla Station to find my lover there,_ ” Rey murmurs. Finn tries to unobtrusively inch closer. He catches Poe’s eye across the hangar and puts a finger to his lips, beckoning Poe over with his other hand. Poe raises his eyebrows but walks over quietly, BB-8 rolling along behind him.

Poe pauses underneath the foil, and a slow smile spreads over his face as the murmured notes of Rey’s song drift down. He climbs the ladder carefully, setting his feet down softly to make sure it doesn’t creak, and settles next to Finn with an arm around his shoulder.

“ _The solar wind is cold now that my love’s left me alone,_ ” Rey sings. She sets down the wire strippers and picks up the torsion locker. There’s a few minutes of quiet—the song appears to have ended—before Rey starts singing again.

“ _Big ears and little paws, who could it be?_ ” she sings, and Poe tucks his face into Finn’s shoulder to muffle a giggle. “ _Ten churkas all in a row, squeak squeak squeak!_ ” Finn doesn’t know what a churka is, but as the song progresses and Rey sings more verses (“… _six churkas asleep in the sand, squeak squeak squeak!_ ”) he imagines a small, scurrying, desert animal, kind of like a sand-rat. His cheeks twitch, and he and Poe sit there smiling, at Rey and at each other.

Rey is focused on the torsion locker and hasn’t seemed to notice her audience—Finn and Poe on the platform and BB-8 beneath the foil. She might have remained unaware, but as she finishes the last verse—“ _one churka safe in the den_ ”—BB-8 beeps in harmony with her _squeaks_.

Rey’s head jerks up and she nearly drops the torsion locker. She turns a little pink when she spots Finn and Poe sitting on the platform, but BB-8 whistles a long trill of triumphant notes and she laughs.

Finn reaches a hand out, and Rey starts to take it before dropping her hand and looking around. Poe picks up a rag and throws it to her; she wipes the grease and oil from her fingers before passing the rag back across, along with the torsion locker and wire strippers. Cleaned up, she takes Finn’s hand and pulls herself across to the platform. She sits down, a little apart from them but still holding Finn’s hand.

“Your voice is beautiful,” Poe says, leaning across Finn to smile at Rey.

“It’s not much,” Rey says. She kicks her feet, hanging over the side of the platform.

“I’ve heard him sing,” Finn says. “Trust me, you’re way better than he is.”

“Can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” Poe agrees. “ _Big ears and little paws, who could it be?_ ” he sings, almost every note wrong and most of them flat to boot. BB-8 makes a derisive noise from under the foil, and Rey snickers. “See?”

“That was pretty bad,” Rey says, and Finn nods.

“So where’d you learn all that?” he asks. “I’ve never heard you sing before.”

“I learned a lot of songs on Jakku,” she says. “The first one I was singing, I learned that from a Corellian trader who came through looking for a compression alternator for her ship. I knew where one was, so I traded her six portions and a pack of filters for my water reclaimer for it.” Rey falls silent. At Finn’s shoulder, Poe is focused and quiet. His chest pushes against Finn’s arm as he breathes. “I kind of thought,” Rey continues, “I thought maybe it was more than a song for her. She looked so lonely when she sang it.” Rey shrugs. “So I remembered. It seemed like…something I could do.”

“Did you ever see her again? Did she come back?” Finn asks, and Rey shakes her head.

“Not that I ever heard of. No one comes back to Jakku.”

“What was the other song?”

“I made it up,” Rey says. “There’s a lot of waiting on Jakku. Sometimes it would take me a few hours to fly out to a salvage site, or the line at Unkar Platt’s would be especially long. I waited out a three-day sandstorm in the cockpit of a downed TIE fighter once. Times like that, there isn’t much to do except make up songs.”

“Three _days_?” Finn asks.

“I had a half-portion with me, I was fine,” Rey says, but she drops her head and her hand twists in Finn’s. Finn squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back. “Anyway, there are these little sand rats on Jakku, churkas. I used to see them all the time at the salvage sites. They live in little groups in burrows in the dunes and come out when it’s cool, at dawn or dusk. They’ve got big ears to cool them down.”

“Cute,” Poe says.

“I guess,” Rey replies. “You can eat them, but they’re honestly too much effort to catch and cook.” Poe snorts. “So I used to just watch them. I made that rhyme about them when I’d been on Jakku maybe three years.”

Finn tugs on her hand a little and she moves so that their shoulders touch. Poe reaches across Finn’s back and strokes her neck gently, like he doesn’t want her to notice he’s doing it.

“The thing about churkas…” Rey says, almost to herself, “They always know where they are. I liked that, when I was younger. The desert is huge, and the dunes are changing all the time. A sandstorm can come through, and when it clears up everything’s different. Wrecks are buried, all the dunes are different shapes, nothing’s the same. But the churkas can always find each other.” She rests her head on Finn’s shoulder and breathes out, long and slow. “They always know how to get home.”

* * *

The soft sounds of someone moving in the front room wake Rey from her morning doze. Finn is still asleep on the other side of the bed, curled facing the wall and breathing slowly, so it must be Poe, up early again. She sits up, careful not to disturb Finn, and pushes her hair out of her face. The sun’s light, muted by the swathes of translucent fabric that drape the window, is the thin hard light of early morning, bright enough to illuminate but not to warm. She shivers and considers burrowing back under the covers, pressing close to Finn’s back, but decides against it. She’s more curious about what Poe’s doing in the front room.

She gets out of bed, making sure to re-cover Finn with blankets. The floor is cold under her bare feet, and she walks quickly to the door of the bedroom.

The front room is so bright, after the sleepy dark of the bedroom, that for a moment she can’t see anything at all. When she blinks away the dazzle she sees Poe seated with his back to her on a low bench pulled up to a table. Above him, a huge window takes up half the wall and gathers every ray of the rising sun. In front of him on the table are dozens of plants.

Poe hasn’t heard Rey enter the room. She walks up behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder, bending down to kiss his ear. He jumps a little, shoulder jerking under her hand, then looks up at her.

“Good morning,” he says.

Rey takes a moment to look at him: mouth warm and relaxed, just on the edge of a smile, eyes crinkled in the bright sunlight, limbs and back still loose from sleep. “You’re up early,” she says. Of the three of them, Poe rises the earliest, taking a little time for himself in the crisp dawn hours. Finn sleeps late whenever he gets the chance, says that after years of mandatory wake-up calls and enforced lights-out hours he has the right to set his own schedule. Rey is somewhere between the two: sometimes she curls together with Finn until late morning, their heads resting on the same pillow, and sometimes she follows Poe into the dawn, each attending to their own business, alone together.

“The bayweed needs repotting,” Poe says. Rey sits down beside him and watches as he pulls a pot towards him and gently extracts the plant inside, coaxing it from the soil without breaking the fine roots. He sets it in a larger pot standing to one side and begins adding handfuls of thick, reddish soil from a bag at his feet.

Finn and Rey hadn’t understood why Poe had been so insistent about the windows when they’d first moved into the house, after the Resistance had disbanded. Then, the day after they’d moved in, Poe had disappeared for a few hours. He’d returned with his speeder loaded down with pots, bags of soil, and slim packets of seeds that rustled when Rey touched them. He’d dragged their table underneath the window and declared that he was going to grow Chordy’s Nova if it killed him.

Now, the table is covered with tools and pots, flowers and herbs, from tiny starpepper sprouts to the dwarf dredgefruit tree in a pot by the door. They eat the fruit for breakfast, when it’s in season.

Poe finishes filling the pot and dusts his hands. “Bayweed isn’t native, but the sunlight here is the right wavelength, and it does really well if you can get the soil mixture right,” he says. “You never stop pruning, though. And look,” he says, pulling a tray over from across the table. It holds about fifteen tiny cups, each filled with dark soil, and in each— “The saltflowers are sprouting.”

The seedlings are barely the size of Rey’s fingernail, two tiny leaves on a fragile stem. She reaches out to touch one, feels it bend against her finger. Its leaves hardly clear the soil. Pulling her hand back, she rests her head on the table as close to the tray as she can and closes her eyes. Clothing rustles and the table vibrates under her cheek as, on the other side of the tray, Poe does the same.

Rey exhales and opens her mind to the Force.

The seedlings make eddies in the flow, growing and strengthening as the sun rises. Each leaf lifts itself to the light, and each root curls deeper into the dark rich soil. Poe bends the Force towards him, like the gravity well of a planet. This close, the Force flows easily between them, like water forever running downhill. Finn is another dip in the flow, still asleep in the bedroom, and she feels him break the surface of his dream and wake, then get out of bed and open the door to the front room.

“Do I want to know?” Finn asks, voice sleepy and soft.

“Rey’s making friends,” Poe says. The table shifts as he stands up, and when he and Finn kiss it sends slow waves through the Force that lap at Rey’s arms and break against her face, warm with love.

She opens her eyes slowly and sits up, letting her awareness of the Force drain away to its usual trickle at the edge of her mind. Poe and Finn sit back down, Poe in his place next to her and Finn on his other side. Rey’s arms go around Poe without her thinking about it and she leans into him as Finn takes her hands. Poe turns his head against hers and kisses the side of her mouth, just where smile lines are beginning to texture her face.

“What do we use them for?” Rey mumbles, her nose mashed into Poe’s neck.

“The saltflowers?” Poe asks. “Nothing. They’re just beautiful.” Finn laughs quietly. “My father grew them in our kitchen window, back on Yavin after he and my mother left the Resistance. He grew a lot of stuff, herbs mostly, for cooking. But he liked saltflower just for the blooms, and my mother liked it because he did. He’d always make sure she had a piece of it in her flight suit whenever she flew out on a mission.” Rey doesn’t say anything. She knows how that ended. “I tried to grow them on D’Qar, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite right. But they like it here.”

Poe brushes his hand through her hair and down her back, and all the pieces click together in Rey’s mind: the sun streaming through the window, the plants crowded onto the table, the saltflower seedlings in their tray and the dredgefruit tree by the door, the rumpled bed in the bedroom. Poe’s ribs against hers, the low rush of his breath in his lungs, and Finn’s warm hands, her fingers against his pulse.

She has so much.

“We have so much,” Poe says, low, like he’s not expecting her to hear, and it so directly echoes her own thought that she sits up to look at him, startled. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says, because she doesn’t need to say what they already know.

“Is this what you two do when you get up so unnecessarily early?” Finn asks. “Talk to plants?”

“Pretty much,” Rey says.

“I was going to plant the sun-nettle starters outside, actually. They’re just about big enough,” Poe says. “The two of you could help, if you wouldn’t rather sleep.”

“In that spot around the side you’ve been clearing?” Rey asks.

Poe nods. “I think they’ll get enough light there. Give it a few years and they’ll be five feet tall.”

“Let’s do it,” Finn says. “I mean, we’re going to be here a while.”

**Author's Note:**

> I invented...a lot of stuff for this fic. Kitrac/Deadball is made up; in my head it looks like a cross between handball and basketball. Churkas are basically Space Gerbils. Pretty much all the plants Poe grows in the last section are likewise made up, except for dredgefruit, which I stole from Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.
> 
> Title is from [For What Binds Us](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/52468) by Jane Hirshfield.


End file.
